The Proactive Life

Warm-Up
• SSH IC; Hillbilly IC; merkins IC; down dog / walk your dog; mosey.

Circle O’ Fun (or perhaps more of an oblong…whatever)

Round 1: Timed 30 seconds of work per station, followed by 10 seconds of rest / moving to next station.
Break Time!
Round 2: 20 seconds work, 8 seconds rest / moving to next station.

Stations:
• Brickkins
• Jump Rope
• Squat thrust with sandbag
• LBCs
• Low lunge pulses – right leg forward
• Burpees
• Rows
• Side plank on right hand, left leg raises
• Brickkins
• Mountain climbers
• Bent-over flies w/ blocks
• Side plank on left hand, right leg raises
• Low lunge pulses – left leg forward
• Rapid SSH
• Squat thrust with sandbag
• Plank
• Brickkins
• Mountain Climbers
• Rows
• Flutter Kicks
• Squat pulses w/ weight vest
• Burpees
• Side raises with bricks
• Freddy Mercurys / bicycle

Break Time: Interval Run
Run the parking lot. Jog the turns, go hard enough on the straightaways that conversation too difficult to achieve. Originally planned five minutes of running but cut back to three as the Q was running late (no weak pun intended).

There was some quality mumble chatter today, but inarguably the line of the workout came from Sq – er, Semi-Colon, who noted that if Gravy, aka Gravy Train, aka G-Train continues to lose weight, he’ll soon be known as G-Spot. Godspeed Friday, Semi-Colon, and hurry back!

COT / BOM
The Proactive Life
Are you living a proactive or reactive life? YHC looked back on 2018 with disappointment; it was not a bad year but it wasn’t what it should have been, personally or professionally. Thinking about it, YHC saw that he was living a reactive life. Indeed, much of YHC’s life has been reactive, and he’s been blessed in this regard to for whatever reason have been the recipient of fortuitous serendipity (that’s redundant, isn’t it – okay, just serendipity). The reactive life can certainly keep you extremely busy, but it doesn’t take much effort; you are simply responding to the needs that others have created and put in front of you. A proactive life takes work. You must figure out what’s imperative to achieve versus what would be somewhat beneficial or somewhat useful to do. You must know in advance who you’re going to spend time with. You must singularly focus on the most important, on what YHC has begun to refer to as the imperative. The proactive life requires that you:
• Simplify. It’s a cliché but like many clichés, this is rooted in truth: There are so many hours in the day. This means there is limited thought inventory, that you can only make so many decisions in a day. The late Steve Jobs of Apple wore the same clothes every day. Deciding what he might wear each day may have only consumed less a minute or two of his time, but by wearing the same jeans, black shirt and sneakers every day, he eliminated one daily decision and freed up time for a more important one. YHC is working on this. As a member of the honorable financial services industry – Outhouse and Snaggle, can I get an amen?! – YHC works out of his home. One quick simplification: Cooking a load of food on Sunday so that lunch is done for the work week. (YHC has learned that a tray of lasagna looks a little tired come Friday, but it is not killed him … yet.)
• Say no. There’s a supply / demand imbalance in our lives; the supply of what can take up our time is seemingly endless, while there is a clearly defined – and limited – amount of time. We must say “no” to the extraneous so that we can consistently say “yes” to the imperative. One YHC life hack here – the incredibly distractive cell phone stays in the kitchen during the workday, not the office. I wrote down all the interruptions it provided over the course of one week – there were well over 20 a day, and none of them, while not necessarily unimportant, were imperative. It gets checked at lunch but in the kitchen it stays until the work day is over.
• Conduct regular self-review and regularly receive external review. Are you focused on the imperative? The self-review has become habit. YHC takes a while a night to fall asleep, so during this time, YHC thinks about his chief constituents – i.e., family, colleagues – and whether he effectively interacted with them during the day. One issue to be addressed tonight: how I can better budget my Q’s so that Inside Out isn’t reminding me, albeit out of some self interest, that we are cutting it close on time for the COT?! Then the next day execute, addressing what holes / needs as it relates to the imperative that were left unaddressed from the prior day. YHC also asks one member of his 16-member team each week, “How am I doing?” The answers are beneficial.

Show n’ Tell is point man for the Gate River Run.
Prayers for Semi-Colon, and for needs unspoken.

My thanks to everyone for the quick clean-up and to Peg for calling a nice audible and breaking out the cooler for the foot support for one of the row stations.

Always a pleasure and an honor to serve as Q for this group. Time to get to work!

Cheers, Slash